enough be given, there seems to be no kind of phenomenon under the sun which patient study will not bring within the range of science. But this only amounts to saying that he must learn humility in another way. God will not stop human science in order to teach man humility. He will not have man ignorant in order to be humble. He will have h`m study and learn, and be humble notwithstanding. And already we can see that, as the bar is removed which once seemed to stop man's progress in knowledge, so all the clearer is the bar made manifest which limits his powers of action. You have studied the laws of God's creation; can you alter one of them in the very slightest degree? You have weighed the matter of the earth; can you create or can you (as would have been thought not long ago) annihilate one grain of its dust? The creation of matter and the creation of the laws of matter is absolutely beyond all your power and all your wisdom; and the longer you study and the wider appears to your eye the possible range of your science, the more clear and certain is this conclusion. There we find the hand of God; there we shall never find the hand of man.

The natural objection to find God in laws rather than in acts is that it tends to a kind of pantheism which robs us of our belief in God's personality. There is not perhaps much, though there is some, tendency to that gross material pantheism which identifies the universe with God, and, making all created matter to be as it were his body, destroys our conception of his nature. But there is a considerable tendency to the subtler pantheism, which forgets him in the idea of a universal law or system of laws, with a rigid mechanical action; without tenderness, without consciousness, without any answer to affection. It is clear, however, that this tendency to pantheism is not in the conception of law, but in our own minds; and the proper corrective is to lift our minds up to the level which science demands of us. For we form our idea of God, and indeed we must do so, by analogy from ourselves. In the infancy of knowledge the spiritual faculty in

man appears to be his will. The ideal of manhood is that of a will working at every moment by pure and high instincts, by the instincts of love, and tenderness, and unselfish generosity, and noble self-respect. But as knowledge grows, even in the short course of our own life, the reason and not the will, the principles and not the instincts, become the supreme characteristic of man, and that which most distinguishes him from all lower creatures. Then the ideal of manhood is that of a will subordinate to an enlightened reason or conscience, acting by laws the ground of which is understood, with a forethought of consequences, with a deliberateness of purpose, not swayed hither and thither by even the highest impulses, but joining to the tenderest feelings the power of harmonizing them with a consistent, unvarying rule of action. So, too, we may think of God as love, but as love already acquainted with all that will happen or that can happen, and therefore able to harmonize that love with a fixed system of laws, and not driven, as human love is often driven, to shift its course by the occurrence or the discovery of circumstances previously unknown. We can think of his tenderness as shown, not in stopping the machinery of the world to adapt our circumstances to our short-sighted wishes, but in supplying our souls with a spiritual power which will enable us to rise above all circumstances whatever.

wear.

This, however, is not all that we get from the idea of law. The laws of conscience, quite as much as the laws of nature, are capable of being represented to our minds in their highest form as absolutely fixed. Not only are they capable of being so represented, but it is the shape which they naturally We naturally think, as soon as we conceive the idea of law at all, of the laws of morals as being in their supreme manifestation eternal and immutable. And while science demands our recognition of the universal dominion of physical laws, and treats all exceptions as so rare that we may safely disregard them in our estimate, so conscience perpetually proclaims the existence and loftier dominion of her moral law, and requires us to believe, under pain of her displeasure, and

as we value the dignity of our own manhood, that all laws are subordinate to hers, and that, whatever appearances there may be to the contrary, holiness and goodness and justice are the final arbiters of all that is, or hath been, or shall be, in the universe. Thus, above and beyond all the physical laws that we know, rises another of a different kind, proclaiming a different authority, demanding a completer obedience. Long induction compels our unhesitating belief in the properties of matter, or, in other words, in the laws of nature. No one doubts that fire will burn, that ice will chill, that poison will destroy; and the proof of the faith is given by the obedience rendered. Precisely the same unhesitating faith will conscience require for the moral law; we are to believe with the same unhesitating certainty that justice and goodness and holiness rule the universe, and we are to act on that belief.

And further, this moral law is not capable, like the physical law, of being conceived as impersonal, but carries in it the conviction of its own personality. For a moral law differs from a physical law in this, that a physical law is satisfied by mere verification: it is enough for a physical law if the facts invariably accord with the predictions of the law. Not so with a moral law. It is not justice if by some mere external accident it so happens that I get my deserts; a murderer is not really punished for a murder because he is accidentally hung by those who know nothing of his crime; a servant would not consider himself to have received his wages because he found an equal amount by a lucky accident. The intention is essential to the morality; it would not satisfy the demands of justice that by some accident it should turn out that justice was always done: it must not only be done, it must be intended. And if there is intention, there is will; and if there is will, there is personality. And thus the moral law, whose sovereign authority is incessantly proclaimed within us, becomes the embodiment of the God of holiness, and in obeying it we are worshipping Him.

It is true that we rise to the belief in the universal dominion of the moral law by an act of faith, and not by demon

stration; but the moral spring is not greater in this case than the intellectual spring in the other. No man can say that it is yet demonstrated in detail that all nature is subject to fixed laws; in fact, many who are not themselves students of science, and are therefore only bound to accept the conclusions of science so far as they are demonstrated, will still maintain that the health of the body and the changes of the weather are under some special government, and not under absolutely fixed laws at all. Yet such is the power of the perpetually operating analogy of science, that no student of nature seriously doubts the universality, or, at any rate, the generality, of the principle. Exceptions may still be possible, for our ignorance is, after all, greater than our knowledge, but assuredly they are so extremely rare that they need not be counted. And why do we thus leap to this conclusion? Because without it all science becomes incomplete and unaccountable; because we have tried it over and over again, and it has never yet failed us; because it perpetually opens new paths of knowledge, and no other principle ever has. Now for precisely the same reasons do we leap to the parallel conclusion in religion. We have not evidence enough to show that the moral law rules the world; there is, indeed, much that obeys it, but there is also much that seems to disobey it; but never for a moment does conscience relax her demand upon our assent: for without it all our morality becomes incomplete and unaccountable; the belief in it has always promised to raise us in the scale of moral being, and, whenever we have tried it, it has never failed to do so; it perpetually lifts us above ourselves to all we find noblest and purest and best, and no other principle ever did or will.

Thus while the fixed laws of science can supply natural religion with numberless illustrations of the wisdom, the beneficence, the order, the beauty that characterize the workmanship of God; while they illustrate his infinity by the marvellous complexity of natural combinations, by the variety and order of his creatures, by the exquisite finish alike bestowed on the very greatest and on the very least of his

works, as if size were absolutely nothing in his sight; so, too, they supply the analogy by which we can rise above themselves to that still higher law in which we find the very presence of the person of the Godhead.

Similar to this relation between science and natural religion is the relation between science and revelation. There was a time when the spheres of these two were distinct; or, if there was ever an appearance of collision, science was required to give place. That time ceased with Galileo, and can never return. The student of science now feels himself bound by the interests of truth, and can admit no other obligation. And if he be a religious man, he believes that both books, the book of Nature and the book of Revelation, come alike from God, and that he has no more right to refuse to accept what he finds in the one than what he finds in the other. The two books are indeed on totally different subjects; the one may be called a treatise on physics and mathematics; the other, a treatise on theology and morals. But they are both by the same Author; and the difference in their importance is derived from the difference in their matter, and not from any difference in their authority. Whenever, therefore, there is a collision between them, the dispute becomes simply a question of evidence. Here, you have in nature God's handiwork; there, you have in the Bible the message which he commissioned certain servants of his to give you. They do not appear to agree. Now, on the one side, are you quite certain in your interpretation of his handiwork? on the other, are you quite certain that you are not mixing up with his message some extraneous matter which belongs not to the message, but to the messenger? In the case of Galileo the question has been answered; the astronomer was right, the theologians were wrong. The apparent statement that the sun went round the earth is now acknowledged to belong to the messenger, not to the message; to the language, not to the substance. The present state of science indicates that there will be more answers in the same direction.